


Ablutions

by FredGodOf



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Domestic, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Island Fic, MREs, Slade's Scarf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-24
Updated: 2014-02-24
Packaged: 2018-01-13 15:47:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1232149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FredGodOf/pseuds/FredGodOf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oliver falls off a cliff, repressed feelings ensue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ablutions

Oliver carefully picked his next foothold and pulled himself up higher on the cliff face. He exhaled, he could do this. Slade had nearly bounced up the damn thing so it was possible, or at least it was possible if you were an Australia Special Forces ninja. He felt above him for the next handhold and the root he had been clinging to with his right hand decided it had been patient about his dawdling long enough and gave way.  
He knocked against a boulder that he had carefully worked his way around on the climb up and it kicked the breath out of him. There was a sharp pain in his arm and then he was back to the forest floor where he had started fifteen minutes ago.  
"What did I tell you about staying in one place too long? Just because something will hold doesn't mean it will hold forever." Oliver heard Slade chastising him as he made his own much more graceful descent down the cliff face.  
Oliver rolled onto his front to push himself to his feet before Slade could object to him taking his time about this as well.  
"Hold still kid." Slade called and Oliver froze. Slade sounded worried instead of mocking which seemed like a sign he was about to die. Maybe there was a snake somewhere nearby. That seemed about par for the course.  
"How bad are you hurt?" Slade asked as he reached the ground.  
Ollie had been focused on catching his breath but looked down to see bright blood welling up out of a long gash on the side of his forearm. He remembered for not the first time that there was a reason that Slade wore heavy canvas no matter how hot out it was, his choice of t-shirt had definitely not provided any protection against whatever he had hit against.  
Oliver clamped down to apply pressure, but the gash was longer than his hand could cover.  
Slade patted down his pockets and seemed to come up wanting. "You bleeding anywhere else?"  
Ollie looked down, he didn't feel more than banged up anywhere else, but he hadn't felt his arm at first either. "I don't think so."  
Slade squinted at him, "You hit your head too?"  
"No?" Oliver answered.  
Slade grunted and unwound the scarf from around his neck. "Damn kid, you're bleeding like a stuck pig. That'll need stiches. Shift your hand up but don't let go till I tell you to." He started to wrap at Oliver's wrist and worked his way up. "Let go now."  
Oliver wiped his right hand on his pants as Slade pulled the scarf tightly as possible and tucked the ends in near his elbow.  
"Can you do stiches?" Oliver asked.  
Slade set off back towards the plane and Oliver followed him.  
"I can," Slade answered, "Shado will do them better. Don't want you to lose your boyish good looks."  
Oliver recognized the forced levity in his words “Are you forgetting the scars I have already?" He tried wiggling all of his fingers, they moved easily so Slade probably wasn't worried about that kind of damage, but he was worried about something.  
They covered ground quickly. Slade whistled the all clear as they came to edge of the clearing.  
Shado whistled the response, then stepped out of the fuselage and met them halfway across the clearing. "You're back early." she said and ran her eyes up and down Oliver. Oliver didn’t try and protest that she assumed he was the one that had probably fucked up.  
"I fell off the cliff." Oliver said, and offered his scarf wrapped arm for her inspection. Blood had soaked through the checkered fabric in a few spots.  
"You any good at stiches?" Slade asked and pushed Ollie forward.  
Oliver stumbled slightly but took the hint and walked towards the plane.  
"I can do stiches.” Shado answered, “But it will be easier to see what I’m doing out here in the sun. Slade, can you help me find what I need?" Shado asked.  
Oliver sat on one of the fallen trees that Slade had him drag into the clearing, he had called a test of strength but Oliver was pretty sure its sole purpose had been to give Slade someplace comfortable to sit that was not in the plane.  
"Put your arm above your head Oliver." Shado called back to him. "It will decrease the blood loss."  
Oliver felt ridiculous but did as he was ordered. He was glad they were the only ones on the island, because this would have been when Fryers would have decided to show up with a squad of armed men.  
Shado and Slade returned quickly. Shado had the suture kit they had salvaged from the camp and a canteen with a mark on it Oliver recognized as the antiseptic she had brewed the week before. Slade followed with a can of water and a length of rope.  
"The likelihood of me actually being able to injure you seems kind of slim." Oliver said with a pointed look at the rope.  
Slade shrugged, "I hope some of the training is paying off."  
Oliver looked to Shado for help.  
"I think you should be fine to hold him still while I do the stitching." She said after a moment.  
Slade swung a leg over the log and took a seat pressed against Ollie's back. He tucked his chin over Oliver's shoulder and clamped one hand at his elbow and one at his wrist.  
"If you knock your head back and break my nose, I'll break yours." Slade grumbled.  
The last time Oliver had needed stiches it had been because he'd stepped on a broken bottle in Tommy's bedroom. Neither had remembered who had dropped it the night before. Tommy had completely freaked out at the sight of how much Ollie had been bleeding and the maid who heard them yelling had had to calm them both down, roughly bandage Ollie's foot and get Tommy to call the private doctor.  
Oliver had remembered the man's surprise at being presented with what must have seemed a fairly mundane injury compared to the ODs and alcohol poisonings that made up most of his house calls. Tommy and Oliver had provided a few of those calls as well.  
By the time the man had finished disinfecting, stitching, and bandaging Oliver's foot, any sign of the accident upstairs had been cleaned up or erased. The blood scrubbed from the carpet and the bottles removed. There hadn’t even been a damp patch on the carpet.  
Oliver watched Shado carefully unwrap the scarf and wondered what they had used to get the blood out so quickly, it probably didn't matter, and it wouldn't be something they had on the island anyways.  
Slade shifted so he was holding the wound closed.  
"No, I need to clean out the wound. He's not bleeding badly enough for that to be the worst problem."  
Slade shifted his hands again and Shado first rinsed out the wound with water and then retrieved tweezers. "I need to get the debris out."  
"Go ahead, I'm good." Oliver assured.  
"You're going to regret saying that." Slade muttered.  
Oliver stared out into the forest to try not to concentrate on the impromptu surgery, but it didn't distract much since there was no way to not feel the movement of Shado's tweezers as she caught each piece of gravel or dirt and removed it.  
"Stop flexing the arm I'm trying to work on." Shado ordered.  
"Sorry."  
"Squeeze my arm with your other hand if you need to grip something." Slade said. "She's almost at the hard part."  
"What's the hard part?" Oliver ground out through clenched teeth as Shado pulled on a long splinter of wood that had been well embedded.  
"The stitches." Shado answered.  
Slade's gripped tightened, Oliver remembered the stiches in his foot as just an odd tugging sensation, but that had been with the benefit of the best local anesthetic money could buy and an Xanax that the doctor seemed to give out as a matter of course.  
“Holy Shit!" Oliver swore as there was a sudden burning pain all through the wound. He finally looked down. Shado was putting the canteen of antiseptic carefully down on the ground. "You could have warned for that bit."  
"It’s better without a warning." Shado said. "That way you don't wince away before I can apply it."  
"That burns like hell."  
"Good sign that it’s working." Slade said.  
Shado threaded the needle. "If you twitch during this I'm going to end up sewing crooked."  
"I knew a few men who had scars like Frankenstein's Monster from field surgeries." Slade said.  
"Did I tell you that Slade made me tie him to a chair when I took a bullet out of him?"  
"I do not hold still well."  
"You're making the face for there's a story involving someone you don't want to talk about." Shado informed him.  
"I broke Wintergreen's nose once when he was setting a twisted ankle." Slade said.  
"There's a specific face for stories he doesn't want to tell?" Oliver asked.  
"Uh-huh." Shado answered. "He scrunches his nose up and scowls."  
"He always scowls."  
"He's sitting right here." Slade objected.  
"It’s a different scowl."  
Slade tightened his grip again and Shado pushed the needle through his skin.  
It was a not a distant sort of pull but a white hot spike of pain and it kept going. Oliver thought it was unfair that the first stich didn't stop hurting when Shado made the next, it just hurt more and more the higher she went on his arm. He clutched at Slade's arm with his free hand and tried to concentrate on the trees across the clearing but they kept going blurry.  
"I think you should let go of Slade." Shado prompted.  
Oliver looked down at his arm to a surprisingly neat row of stiches, he unclenched his fingers and Slade stood up and rubbed at the dents in his arm, and then turned at headed off towards the tree line.  
"Oliver?" Shado asked.  
"Sorry," Oliver said and turned back to her.  
Shado held up the can of water. "You should rinse off the blood, you look you've been butchering something."  
"Right." Oliver said and took it from her, "Thank you."  
Shado shrugged and started to gather up the supplies.  
Oliver rinsed off his arm and saw the scarf lying on the ground. He picked it up and touched the blood stained splotches.  
"It’s probably seen worse." Shado suggested.  
Oliver crumpled it in his hands; even fully dressed Slade looked naked without it. "I don't suppose you know any tricks for getting blood out do you?"  
Shado giggled at him and he frowned. "What?"  
"Most women do." She explained.  
Oliver suspected he was making an idiotic face.  
"We don't have any peroxide or I would have been cleaning your arm out with that instead, but use cold water instead of hot, hot will just make the stain stick. Its fresh enough it should come out, but don't scrub too hard or I'll have to redo your stiches."  
"That is an excellent incentive to behave myself." Oliver said, "I would like to never have stiches again."  
"I'll have to take them out once the cut heals."  
"That sounds like it hurts too, on a scale of less to more?"  
Shado shrugged, "I've never had stiches without anesthetic, you'll have to tell me.” She frowned at him, “What are you thinking?”  
Oliver twisted the scarf in his hands and tried to consider his words, Shado wouldn't like what he was thinking, but she could usually tell when he was lying and that would make her angry. "Sometimes I forget that your life wasn't always this." he said and waved generally at the ruined fuselage and the jungle beyond. Occasionally he thought it was unfair that the first time in his life he needed to actually make an effort at treating people properly he ended up with two human lie detectors.  
"Because I'm better at this than you are?" Shado asked, the twist of her mouth showing distaste.  
"Pretty much." Oliver answered. "I doubt you would have fallen off the cliff."  
"Probably not." Shado agreed easily. "Help me put things back in the plane and then you can do your laundry."  
Oliver helped her stow the water and the first aid supplies in the plane. There was still no sign of Slade returning so Oliver took the scarf and headed down to the stream they usually washed in.  
He dunked the scarf under water and watched the red stream off of it in rivulets and wash away downstream. The stiches on his arm were stark and black and little droplets of blood still welled up.  
He carefully rubbed at the blood still clinging to the scarf since the weave was fairly loose. Slade hadn't said where it had come from. Shado told him he had probably picked it up in the Middle East, Oliver had countered that he saw the same style on more than a few people back home.  
Shado had giggled and Oliver had declared that Slade had definitely picked it up in Brooklyn and secretly probably wore fake black frame glasses when he was back in Australia, which had caused more giggles and a demand for an explanation of what a hipster was supposed to be. He hadn't been able to come up with anything more concrete than that they liked things old things, but ironically and wore thick framed glasses. Oliver had known a couple of people when he still went to college who had been heavy into that kind of style, but he and Tommy had figured out pretty early on that when everyone who could Google Forbes knew your father's salary, dressing like you were poor was idiotic and not received well.  
Oliver wondered how long it would take Tommy to find him in crowd these days. He pushed his hair behind his ears as he ducked down to rinse the scarf again. As well as the shaggy hair there were ragged holes in his pair of uniform pants he wore and he had left his tee shirt on the shore which displayed his ever increasing collection of scars. His stubble was getting back into the beard range but shaving it meant letting Slade run a very sharp knife over his throat while he tried desperately not to swallow so it was usually a biweekly event instead of daily. There had not been safety razors in any of the supply caches they had tracked down so far, Oliver was not keeping his fingers crossed.  
He pulled the scarf up and spread it out, only faint traces of the stains remained in the fabric. It seemed like blood should be harder to wash away.  
Shado was fletching arrows when he returned to the plane. He spread the scarf out to dry in the sun and handed her a yellow flower he had found on the bank.  
"You brought me a flower?" She took it delicately and sniffed it. It didn't have much of a scent, which made it better than the first kind he had found which smelled a bit like feet.  
Oliver shrugged, "I am really hoping that it isn't poisonous."  
"I think you did fine this time." Shado answered and tucked it behind her ear. "Apology for forgetting I am a real person accepted."  
Oliver smiled at her and dropped down to sit beside her. "Do you want help?"  
"You can hold the shaft for me." She said and then after moment grinned, "That's could be dirty couldn't it?"  
Oliver laughed, "Yep."  
They fletched arrows, retrieved water from the stream, boiled it and then filtered it before refilling the water cans, one bout of dysentery was more than anyone needed in their lives and Oliver had already exceeded that since the shipwreck. Oliver retrieved the scarf since it had dried in the sun and folded it neatly into a square before he put it on Slade's box of supplies by his bunk.  
The sun slanted towards the horizon and there was still no sign of Slade. They contemplated the stack of MRES in the corner of the plane. They had found several caches of those but Slade was the only one who seemed to like them.  
"You shouldn't pick up a bow until you're healed." Shado said. Improving Oliver’s archery was their usual excuse for killing something fresh for dinner.  
"Beef Ravioli, Chili with Beans or Chicken Fajita then?" Oliver asked.  
Shado sorted through the packages, "Tuna in Pouch."  
"They really need to work on the name for that one." Oliver said.  
They heard Slade whistle the all clear from the edge of the clearing and Oliver whistled it back.  
Shado looked out one of the holes in the fuselage. "He hasn't actually left the forest. Just taken away the excuse to go look for him."  
"He won't be back for hours then will he?" Oliver asked.  
"Not likely." Shado answered.  
They unpacked the MREs and Oliver traded his fruit drink mix for Shado's instant coffee.  
"I calculated it; the MREs will reach their expiration date before we would finish them." Shado said.  
"That's kind of depressing." Oliver poked at the chili with his spoon. "Do you think we'll be here in three years?"  
"Someone will come looking for Fryers, if only to make sure he's dead." Shado said. "We'll find a way off then."  
They finished their meals and cleaned up the plane as dark fell. Oliver settled into his bunk and Shado took a seat near one of the larger holes. He heard the soothingly repetitive noise of a knife on wood as she sharpened branches into stakes to use in traps.  
He woke up when Slade whistled, Shado whistled back before he could respond and Oliver listened as he climbed into the back of the plane near her bunk.  
"Everything good?" Slade asked.  
"If you wanted to talk you could have come back before dinner."  
"I went and checked the traps, didn't find anything."  
"That's because we checked them yesterday." Shado said sharply. "And how were you checking them after dark? Actually you can explain that in the morning, Good night."  
"Good night, Shado." Slade responded and Oliver heard him make his way down the plane towards him.  
Oliver listened to the sound of buckles being released and snaps coming unsnapped as Slade removed armor and fatigues and then shook out his blankets. "Kid?" he called softly.  
"Yeah." Oliver mumbled, he was in agreement with Shado, if Slade wanted to have a conversation he should have come back much earlier.  
Slade didn't say anything but pressed his wrist against Oliver's forehead.  
"No fever, I promise." Oliver said.  
"Alright kid." Slade said, "Go back to sleep."  
Oliver was more than happy to follow Slade's orders for once.  
First light always hit Oliver square across the eyes, and if that didn't work there was usually at least bird who liked to sit just outside the plane and scream until he got out of his bed and threw something at it. Sometimes he thought the birds had caught on that they occasionally dumped the inedible bits of animals and MREs in the woods and hung around waiting for that, sometimes he thought they were just evil spirits sent specifically to prevent him from sleeping.  
He rolled out of his bunk and picked up one of the stones from the pile he had got in the habit of keeping under his bed. He threw the rock in the general direction of the squawking and two birds rose from the grass and flapped away to the forest.  
When he ducked back under the netting Slade was sitting up and looking over his scarf in the morning light.  
Oliver dropped down back onto his own bunk and closed his eyes. He evened out his breath and waited.  
"Thanks kid." Slade said softly.  
"You're welcome." Oliver mumbled.  
Slade chuckled, "You're getting good at that at least."  
"I've been hurt a lot worse than this." Oliver said cautiously, he didn't roll over to face Slade or open his eyes. He and Shado had consulted and not looking at him was the best way to get Slade to actually answer a question more complicated than where is the bigger gun?  
"Why do I care now?" Slade asked.  
"Pretty much."  
"You get hurt during a mission, or because you're dumb enough to get captured, that's life and you own damn fault, you get hurt because I'm training you, that's my fault."  
"That would almost make sense."  
"Get some more sleep kid, as soon as that arm heals up there's no more going easy on you."  
"Have you been going easy on me?" Oliver asked.  
“You have no idea.” Slade assured.


End file.
